Last Planet Improv was fortunate enough last week to partner on multiple days with a fellow nonprofit, The Arts Empowerment Project, and a very special group of children.

Most of these children were currently living in group home facilities.

We like to arrive early to our events to learn as much about our students and their situations as we can.

As the warm-up facilitator walked the students through mindfulness exercises, she also carefully and thoughtfully asked them questions.  After asking their permission, she often asked quite personal questions about their life experiences.

The responses she received were both heartbreaking and invigorating.

It was evident that these children, who had experienced what most of us would deem the worst of growing up situations possible, answered with wisdom and self-reflection beyond their years.

Why were these children so resilient?  Was there a special trait they possessed?

(Below) is a post at www.newsweek.com that discusses resiliency and children.

Special Issue:  How Kids Grow the Miracle of Resiliency

A prominent child psychiatrist, E. James Anthony, once proposed this analogy: there are three dolls, one made of glass, the second of plastic, the third of steel. Struck with a hammer, the glass doll shatters; the plastic doll is scarred. But the steel doll proves invulnerable, reacting only with a metallic ping.

In life, no one is unbreakable. But child-health specialists know there are sharp differences in the way children bear up under stress. In the aftermath of divorce or physical abuse, for instance, some are apt to become nervous and withdrawn; some may be illness-prone and slow to develop. But there are also so-called resilient children who shrug off the hammer blows and go on to highly productive lives. The same small miracle of resiliency has been found under even the most harrowing conditions – in Cambodian refugee camps, in crack-ridden Chicago housing projects. Doctors repeatedly encounter the phenomenon: the one child in a large, benighted brood of five or six who seems able to take adversity in stride. “There are kids in families from very adverse situations who really do beautifully, and seem to rise to the top of their potential, even with everything else working against them,” says Dr. W. Thomas Boyce, director of the division of behavioral and developmental pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. “Nothing touches them; they thrive no matter what.”

Something, clearly, has gone right with these children, but what? Researchers habitually have come at the issue the other way around. The preponderance of the literature has to do with why children fail, fall ill, turn delinquent. Only recently, doctors realized they were neglecting the equally important question of why some children don’t get sick. Instead of working backward from failure, they decided, there might be as much or more to be learned from studying the secrets of success. In the course of looking at such “risk factors” as poverty, physical impairment or abusive parents, they gradually became aware that there were also “protective factors” that served as buffers against the risks. If those could be identified, the reasoning went, they might help develop interventions that could change the destiny of more vulnerable children.

At the same time, the recognition that many children have these built-in defenses has plunged resiliency research into political controversy. “There is a danger among certain groups who advocate nonfederal involvement in assistance to children,” says Duke University professor Neil Boothby, a child psychologist who has studied children in war zones. “They use it to blame people who don’t move out of poverty. Internationally, the whole notion of resiliency has been used as an excuse not to do anything.”

The quest to identify protective factors has produced an eager burst of studies in the past 10 or 15 years, with new publications tumbling off the presses every month. Although the studies so far offer no startling insights, they are providing fresh perspectives on how nature and nurture intertwine in childhood development. One of the prime protective factors, for example, is a matter of genetic luck of the draw: a child born with an easygoing disposition invariably handles stress better than one with a nervous, overreactive temperament. But even highly reactive children can acquire resilience if they have a consistent stabilizing element in their young lives – something like an attentive parent or mentor.

The most dramatic evidence on that score comes not from humans but from their more researchable cousins, the apes. In one five-year-long study, primate researcher Stephen Suomi has shown that by putting infant monkeys in the care of supportive mothers, he could virtually turn their lives around. Suomi, who heads the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, has been comparing “vulnerable” and “invulnerable” monkeys to see if there are useful nurturing approaches to be learned. Differences of temperament can be spotted in monkeys before they’re a week old. Like their human counterparts, vulnerable monkey infants show measurable increases in heart rate and stress-hormone production in response to threat situations. “You see a fairly consistent pattern of physiological arousal, and also major behavioral differences,” says Suomi. “Parallel patterns have been found in human-developmental labs, so we feel we’re looking at the same phenomena”

Left alone in a regular troop, these high-strung infants grow up to be marginal figures in their troops. But by putting them in the care of particularly loving, attentive foster mothers within their first four days of life, Suomi turns the timid monkeys into social lions. Within two months, they become bold and outgoing. Males in the species Suomi has been working with normally leave their native troop at puberty and eventually work their way into a new troop. The nervous, vulnerable individuals usually are the last to leave home. But after being “cross-fostered” to loving mothers, they develop enough confidence so that they’re first to leave.

Once on their own, monkeys have complicated (but somehow familiar) patterns of alliances. Their status often depends on whom they know and to whom they’re related. In squabbles, they quickly generate support among friends and family members. The cross-fostered monkeys grow very adept at recruiting that kind of support. It’s a knack they somehow get through interaction with their foster mothers, in which they evidently pick up coping styles as well as information. “It’s essentially a social-learning phenomenon,” says Suomi. “I would argue that’s what’s going on at the human level, too. Evidently, you can learn styles in addition to specific information.”

In the long run, the vulnerable infants not only were turned around to normality, they often rose to the top of their hierarchies; they became community leaders. Boyce notes there are significant “commonalities” between Suomi’s findings and studies of vulnerable children. “The implications are that vulnerable children, if placed in the right social environment, might become extraordinarily productive and competent adult individuals,” he says.

Children, of course, can’t be fostered off to new parents or social conditions as readily as monkeys. Most resiliency research is based on children who have not had such interventions in their lives. Nevertheless, some of the findings are revealing. One of the definitive studies was conducted by Emmy E. Werner, a professor of human development at the University of California, Davis, and Ruth S. Smith, a clinical psychologist on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Together, they followed 698 children, all descendants of Kauaiian plantation workers, from their birth (in 1955) up to their early 30s. About half the children grew up in poverty; one in six had physical or intellectual handicaps diagnosed between birth and age 2. Of the 225 designated as high risk, two thirds had developed serious learning or behavior problems within their first decade of life. By 18 they had delinquency records, mental-health problems or teenage pregnancies. “Yet one out of three,” Werner and Smith noted, “grew into competent young adults who loved well, worked well, played well and expected well.”

Some of the protective factors the two psychologists identified underscore the nature-nurture connection. Like other researchers, they found that children who started out with robust, sunny personalities were often twice lucky: not only were they better equipped to cope with life to begin with, but their winning ways made them immediately lovable. In effect, the “nicer” the children, the more readily they won affection – both nature and nurture smiled upon them. There were also other important resiliency factors, including self-esteem and a strong sense of identity. Boyce says he encounters some children who even at 2 or 3 have a sense of “presence” and independence that seem to prefigure success. “It’s as if these kids have had the ‘Who am I’ questions answered for them,” he says.

One of the more intriguing findings of the Kauai research was that resilient children were likely to have characteristics of both sexes. Boys and girls in the study tended to be outgoing and autonomous, in the male fashion, but also nurturant and emotionally sensitive, like females. “It’s a little similar to what we find in creative children,” observes Werner. Some other key factors were inherent in the children’s surroundings rather than their personalities. It helped to have a readily available support network of grandparents, neighbors or relatives. Others note that for children anywhere, it doesn’t hurt at all to be born to well-off parents. “The advantage of middle-class life is there’s a safety net,” says Arnold Sameroff, a developmental psychologist at Brown University’s Bradley Hospital. “If you screw up, there’s someone to bail you out.”

In most cases, resilient children have “clusters” of protective factors, not just one or two. But the sine qua non, according to Werner, is a “basic, trusting relationship” with an adult. In all the clusters in the Kauai study, “there is not one that didn’t include that one good relationship, whether with a parent, grandparent, older sibling, teacher or mentor – someone consistent enough in that person’s life to say, ‘You count,’ and that sort of begins to radiate other support in their lives.” Even children of abusive or schizophrenic parents may prove resilient if they have had at least one caring adult looking out for them – someone, as Tom Boyce says, ”who serves as a kind of beacon presence in their lives.”

Such relationships do the most good when they are lasting. There is no lasting guarantee for resiliency itself, which is subject to change, depending on what sort of ups and downs people encounter. Children’s ability to cope often improves naturally as they develop and gain experience, although it may decline after a setback in school or at home. Werner notes that around half the vulnerable children in the Kauai study had shaken off their previous problems by the time they reached their late 20s or early 30s. “In the long-term view, more people come through in spite of circumstances. There is an amazing amount of recovery, if you don’t focus on one particular time when things are falling apart.”

Ironically, this “self-righting” tendency has made the resiliency issue something of a political football. Conservatives have seized on the research to bolster their case against further social spending. “It’s the politics of ‘It’s all within the kid’,” says Lisbeth Schorr, a lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School whose book, “Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage,” has had a wide impact in the field. “The conservative argument against interventions like Operation Head Start and family-support programs is that if these inner-city kids and families just showed a little grit they would pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But people working on resilience are aware that when it comes to environments like the inner city, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to talk about what’s intrinsic to the kids, because the environment is so overwhelming.”

So overwhelming, indeed, that some researchers voice serious doubts over how much change can be brought about in multiple-risk children. Brown’s Sameroff, who has been dealing with poor inner-city black and white families in Rochester, N.Y., says the experience has left him “more realistic” about what is possible. “Interventions are important if we can target one or two things wrong with a child. So you provide psychotherapy or extra help in the classroom, then there’s a lot better chance.” But the children he deals with usually have much more than that going against them–not only poverty but large families, absent fathers, drug-ridden neighborhoods and so on. “We find the more risk factors the worse the outcome,” says Sameroff. “With eight or nine, nobody does well. For the majority of these children, it’s going to involve changing the whole circumstance in which they are raised.”

Others are expressing their own reservations, as the first rush of enthusiasm in resiliency research cools somewhat. “A lot of the early intervention procedures that don’t follow through have been oversold,” says Emmy Werner. “Not everyone benefited equally from such programs as Head Start.” Yet, according to child-development specialists, only a third of high-risk children are able to pull through relatively unaided by such interventions. Says Werner: “At least the high-risk children should be guaranteed basic health and social programs.”

Interestingly, when Suomi separates his vulnerable monkeys from their foster mothers at 7 months – around the same time that mothers in the wild go off to breed, leaving their young behind–the genes reassert themselves, and the monkeys revert to fearful behavior. According to Suomi, they do recover again when the mothers return and their new coping skills seem to stay with them. Yet their experience underscores the frailty of change. Boyce, an admirer of Suomi’s work, acknowledges that the question of how lasting the effects of early interventions are remains open. But, he adds, programs like Head Start continue to reverberate as much as 15 years later, with reportedly higher school-completion rates and lower rates of delinquency and teen pregnancies.

Boyce recalls that years ago, when he was at the University of North Carolina, he dealt with an 8-year-old child from an impoverished, rural black family, who had been abandoned by his mother. The boy also had “prune-belly syndrome,” an anomaly of the abdominal musculature that left him with significant kidney and urinary problems, requiring extensive surgery. But he also had two doting grandparents who had raised him from infancy. They showered him with love and unfailingly accompanied him on his hospital visits. Despite his physical problems and loss of a mother, the boy managed to perform “superbly” in school. By the age of 10, when Boyce last saw him, he was “thriving.”

Children may not be as manageable or resilient as laboratory monkeys. If anything, they are more susceptible in the early years. But with the right help at the right time, they can overcome almost anything. “Extreme adversity can have devastating effects on development,” says psychologist Ann Masten, who did some of the groundbreaking work in the resiliency field with her University of Minnesota colleague Norman Garmezy. “But our species has an enormous capacity for recovery. Children living in a hostile care-giving environment have great difficulty, but a lot of ability to recover to better functioning if they’re given a chance. That’s a very important message from the resiliency literature.” Unfortunately, the message may not be getting through to the people who can provide that chance.

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Most likely we will never cross paths with those students we worked with last week.

Obviously, we hope that the harshness of their lives to date is reversed as they age further.

We wish them all the positivity, love and success possible in their personal and professional lives.

We hope that they all continue to be steel dolls.